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Digital Digest: Pinterest and the Interest Graph
Digital Digest: What Edelman Canada is reading in digital marketing, technology and strategy. Fresh links served up Fridays.
A recent comScore report shines a light on the fastest growing social networks, and the breakout hits are smaller networks serving a niche audience. To take one example, Pinterest, a visual bookmarking site that encourages users to organize their “pins” into interest categories, increased time spent on site worldwide by 512%. Pinterest is part of a new wave of online networks that allow users to follow their interests as well as their friends. This poses a puzzling question: do we as users want to discover new content based on our interests or our social connections (or both)? And will niche sites and apps that leverage the Interest Graph, like Pinterest, LOOKBOOK, Quora, Instagram and Untappd, attract more users than sites that leverage the Social Graph, like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter? Read more »
January 13, 2012 in Digital Digest, Our IdeasDigital Digest: Do Something Different in 2012
Digital Digest: What Edelman Canada is reading in digital marketing, technology and strategy. Fresh links served up Fridays.
“The most dangerous poison is the feeling of achievement,” said IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad. “The antidote is to every evening think what can be done better tomorrow.” The reality is that it’s easy to keep doing the things that we know will work. But sometimes we want to do more than deliver the same old results – we want great ideas that enable us to exceed the expectations of our peers, competitors, bosses and clients.
Fortunately, these days there is no shortage of new ideas that are also great. To help you kick off the new calendar year, this week’s edition of Edelman Canada’s Digital Digest rounds up six articles that show off new strategies and tactics in public engagement for 2012. Read more »
January 6, 2012 in Digital Digest, Our IdeasDigital Digest: What does 2011 mean for 2012?
Digital Digest: What Edelman Canada is reading in digital marketing, technology and strategy. Fresh links served up Fridays.
“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards,” quipped the novelist Aldous Huxley. As we reach the end of a complex and media-saturated 2011, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by a seeming over-abundance of the latest and greatest. But what happened this year that will have a truly long-term impact, and what was merely a flash in the pan?
To help you make sense of it all, this week’s edition of Edelman Canada’s Digital Digest, the last for this Calendar year, looks at the major events and trends that shaped 2011, and how they’ll continue to influence organizations and consumers in 2012. Read more »
December 16, 2011 in Digital Digest, Our IdeasDigital Digest: Fly With #NewTwitter
Digital Digest: What Edelman Canada is reading in digital marketing, technology and strategy. Fresh links served up Fridays.
On Thursday Twitter announced a major update to its product, and launched brand pages with a select group of 21 companies, charities and individuals. This isn’t the first time the world’s third largest social network has announced an evolving mission: it’s tagline has been updated three times since 2006 (“What’s happening?”) through last week (“Follow your interests”) and today (“Yours to discover”). But the move shows a substantial change in mentality at Twitter, driven by CEO Dick Costolo who wants Twitter to “make A LOT of money” by trading access to its audience for brand dollars, as Facebook has been doing for years and news media did before them.
So how can PR professionals and marketers work with Twitter’s new tools to run more successful programs online? This week’s edition of Edelman Canada’s Digital Digest presents six links to help you fly with #NewTwitter, including three views from Twitter and three views from third parties on the implications for marketing and communications. Read more »
December 9, 2011 in Digital Digest, Our IdeasDigital Digest: Earning and Maintaining Trust
Digital Digest: What Edelman Canada is reading in digital marketing, technology and strategy. Fresh links served up Fridays.
“There’s trust that the product will be excellent, and then there’s trust in the company,” said Jim Godfrey, Vice President, Public Affairs EMEA, Starbucks, in a recent interview with Edelman (Starbucks is a client). Trust is now an essential line of business that grants companies their license to operate and insulates against reputational damage according to the 2011 Edelman Trust Barometer (the 2012 findings are due in the New Year). But in a challenging economy many companies can feel pressure to focus on pumping out their core product in the most cost efficient way possible, jettisoning the good behaviours and responsible practices that are fundamental to earning and maintaining that license to operate.
But companies must deliver on their promises to customers by getting the core products and experiences right “in times of economic sunshine or rain,” said Godfrey. That’s why this week’s edition of Edelman Canada’s Digital Digest looks at six ways to build trust, or forfeit it, from the respect you show your stakeholders, to how you safeguard your customers’ data, to how you comply with regulation. Read more »
December 2, 2011 in Digital Digest, Our IdeasDigital Digest: The Age of Complexity
Digital Digest: What Edelman Canada is reading in digital marketing, technology and strategy. Fresh links served up Fridays.
During his keynote address at the Institute of Public Relations’ annual dinner earlier this month, Richard Edelman distinguished between two kinds of worlds: a complicated one, in which many moving parts interact in predictable and manageable patterns; and a complex one, where unforeseen intersections lead to unexpected outcomes (blog post, full text PDF). In this week’s edition of Edelman Canada’s Digital Digest, we look at six case studies for organizations that are successfully, or not, navigating the Age of Complexity. Read more »
November 25, 2011 in Digital Digest, Our IdeasDigital Digest: Make the World Better
Digital Digest: What Edelman Canada is reading in digital marketing, technology and strategy. Fresh links served up Fridays.
In a hyper-connected world, brands and organizations that want to matter to their stakeholders must move from old thinking about differentiation to actually making a difference to people, communities and societies. “Real benefits that improve people’s quality of life,” is the key to winning hearts, minds and profits, says Umair Haque, an economist and consultant.
Too often brands get caught up in “active and loud brand promotion,” as SAP’s Michael Brenner says (see fourth item). That’s why this week’s edition of Edelman Canada’s Digital Digest looks at four organizations that are thriving by using the Web to make the world a better place for their customers and stakeholders, and one that is failing to do so. Read more »
November 18, 2011 in Digital Digest, Our IdeasDigital Digest: Is it time for Google+?
Digital Digest: What Edelman Canada is reading in digital marketing, technology and strategy. Fresh links served up Fridays.
On Monday, Google started letting companies set up their own brand pages on Google+, Google’s upstart social network. That means that your customers have a “new way to consume news, to connect with your favourite businesses, brands and organizations,” wrote reporter Trevor Melanson in Canadian Business. In this week’s edition of Edelman Canada’s Digital Digest we look at how marketers and communicators can get followers and engage with fans using Google’s newest tool (you can set up your page here). Read more »
November 11, 2011 in Digital Digest, Our IdeasDigital Digest: Selling-In Social Edition
Digital Digest: What Edelman Canada is reading in digital marketing, technology and strategy. Fresh links served up Fridays.
Many companies maintain cultures that destroy productivity by overworking and undervaluing their employees, wrote Tony Schwartz in the Harvard Business Review this week. Myths such as “multitasking is critical” are obstacles to achieving peak performance at work, he argued, and need to be shown the door. But these companies are not led by bad people, they are simply doing what they have always done.
Many public relations and marketing executives as well are continuing to do what they have always done, caught up in myths such as “you can’t prove the ROI of social media.” In this week’s edition of Edelman Canada’s Digital Digest we give you some tips and tricks for selling-in social media to your bosses and the rest of your organization. Read more »
November 4, 2011 in Digital Digest, Our IdeasDigital Digest: Social First Edition
Digital Digest: What Edelman Canada is reading in digital marketing, technology and strategy. Fresh links served up Fridays.
Too often a social strategy is tacked on to a traditional program that has already been signed off on. But to develop a truly integrated and effective campaign, communicators and marketers need to think social right from the start. In this edition of Edelman Canada’s Digital Digest we take this concept a step further by imagining a Social-First campaign, in which the digital strategy informs the traditional program. Read more »
October 28, 2011 in Digital Digest, Our IdeasDigital Digest: Just the Basics, Please!
Digital Digest: What Edelman Canada is reading in digital communications, technology and strategy. Fresh links served up Fridays.
How we talk about social media can sometimes be more confusing than clarifying. Velocity of conversation? Share of voice? Earned Media Value? Cadence of amplification? In this week’s edition of Edelman Canada’s Digital Digest we strip away the ornamentation and look at the fundamentals. Just the basics, please!
Interview: How to implement a social media strategy
Companies that use social media effectively have an agreed governance model and clearly assigned responsibilities between and within departments for each aspect of their social media plan. In this Globe and Mail live chat, Michael Brito, senior vice-president of Social Business Planning at Edelman Digital, explains how companies big and small can lay the foundation for social media success.
Globe and Mail: Implementing a social media strategy Read more »
October 21, 2011 in Digital Digest, Our IdeasDigital Digest: Customers Edition
Digital Digest: What Edelman Canada is reading in digital marketing, technology and strategy. Fresh links served up Fridays.
In basic marketing theory, customers are divided by four behaviours: awareness, interest, desire and action. The words may change but the formula suggests that marketers are three times more interested in potential customers than existing ones. As author Seth Godin once sniped on his blog, “customers are traditionally undervalued.” So in this week’s edition of Edelman Canada’s Digital Digest we look at how brands are using social media to learn from, and create value for, their existing customers. Read more »
October 14, 2011 in Digital Digest, Our Ideas
Digital Digest: Measure What Matters
Digital Digest: What Edelman Canada is reading in digital marketing, technology and strategy. Fresh links served up Fridays.
Social networks are not great places to expect profits to materialize, argued Bo Peabody in a 2009 op-ed. He knows whereof he speaks: he founded Tripod in 1995, a social networking site that grew to be the 8th largest site on the Internet, but it never made much money and it is little remembered today.
Success is different for every firm, but usually money is involved. This means that marketers and agencies need to be able to take an ingredients list of performance metrics and cook an ROI-flavoured data cake. But in a world of net new fans, sentiment deltas, bounce rates, monthly unique visitors and net positive customer recommendations, it isn’t always clear what measurements are really important.
“We want the right information on demand, without delay, without error,” wrote author and analyst Jonathan B. Spira. “As we add in more information, more systems, and more ways of getting information, what we end up with is something very different.” We can’t spend infinite time measuring infinite metrics, so this week’s edition of Edelman Canada’s Digital Digest will help you measure what matters. Read more »
October 7, 2011 in Digital Digest, Our Ideas